I used to get a
big laugh from my friends when I let slip that I was planning on publishing a
book of poetry in Yiddish.“You’re
determined to be anonymous!” they’d exclaim.“If there’s anyone left who reads Yiddish, they’re going to go for
classic prose like Sholom Aleichem, not poetry - certainly not from an English
poet who lives in Israel and suddenly feels a need to explore a long-gone personal
past!”

But many of
those friends showed up to the book’s launch in the spring of 2018, and some of
them later whispered to me that they suddenly recalled a few expressions in
Yiddish from their youth, a phrase their parents used, a couple of words from
their neighbors, a punchline from a joke that can’t be translated into any
other language.I found myself
proclaiming that if we could take all those bits and pieces, added them up, joined
them together, and built something from them, maybe it would do us some good. “Not
only do you live in the past,” my best friend responded, “you live in another
world!”

I’ve been
writing poetry in Yiddish for almost fifty years now.Something would come to mind from some childhood
kitchen conversation; something would happen that I would want to see from an
ironic perspective; or I’d start talking to myself in the mirror. In those
moments I would try to turn the experience into the written word, but rarely
would I write it down without first translating it into English.So often these poems came out lame and private,
with unclear humor, and most of the time I put them aside as words that would
have meaning to me alone.

The language was not just from home.My Hebrew education in a Jewish day school
was supplemented by old-fashioned bible classes two days a week.The aged Rabbi Gedaliah Cohen, who taught bar
mitzvah boys to sing, agreed for some reason to take me on as a student of the
Bible – reading with me a sentence in Ashkenazi Hebrew and translating it to
Yiddish.My mother, who must have done
some special convincing to get me accepted as his student, used to laugh at the
frequent misunderstandings that must have resulted from these lessons.She would tell me about it in Yiddish:

‘Vayomos, Sora, AND the translation? All
three?Must have been a plague!’”

My mother’s anecdote
led me to take great care of translation in the future, and respect the
independence of individual languages.I
would constantly ask the rabbi questions about the meaning of the words, the
meaning of the text.For some reason the
weary octogenarian respected my questions and considered his answers carefully,
no matter how outrageous they were.One
of my earliest poems describes the nature of our dialogues:

One lesson the
Rabbi taught me was that in Yiddish anything could be legitimately questioned.
Yiddish opened up possibilities of providing alternative perspectives on
everything.

This method of open
questioning came up just recently in a poem while I was writing a series of
lyrics about Biblical heroines for the rock group Panic Ensemble.The singer, Yael Kraus, wanted to sing from
the viewpoint of otherwise silent women, and I wrote from the perspective of
Lot’s wife, as one reluctant to leave the revels of Sodom.

SODOM

Look, look at
the light!

See the sky
glowing bright with the fire

Burning up,
last night we were one

I want you to
stay in my eyes

Oh the wildest
nights

Holding the men

And women of
Sodom

I want to love
them all

Taste, drunk
with the night,

Taste my blood
grown thick with desire

Burning up,
blinded by love

I want them to
stay in my arms

Oh the wildest
nights

Holding the men

And women of
Sodom

I want to love
them all

Before us now -
banal days

One life one
love one lord

Empty land, no
pleasure of love

I choose to
purge it from my heart

Oh the wildest
nights

Holding the men

And women of
Sodom

I am becoming
salt.

I wrote about Jezebel as a material girl, about
Vashti warning the other women of the dangers of acceding to her punishment,
and about Hagar as a victim of a jealous competitor, after the manner of the
Yiddish poet Itzik Manger. But with Rebecca I was stuck.Reading the chapter about Rebecca over and
over, I could not understand her first reaction to the sight of her future
husband after covering her face.The
Hebrew says “Vatipol mi hagamal”;a literal translation would be that as soon as she caught sight of Isaac,
she “fell off the camel.” But the usual explanations describe her veiling and descent
as a mark of her deep respect. I wound up writing a poem about what it was like
to see the intended husband as a forty-year-old shell-shocked virgin, after she
had been prepared by the sophisticated and expensive courtship of the slave.This was my Talmud teaching – turning a
situation around and seeing it from the opposite possibility – if only to check
out the options, if only to make sure that the conclusion reached is the right
one.The Aramaic term is Ifcha mistabra.The English would be – “it wouldn’t hurt to
try it on.”This way of looking at holy texts continues to appeal to me, to
remind me that it is always good to examine other possibilities.

It was not just
the Rabbi with whom I learned the nuances that language could provide and the unorthodox
ways of thinking.The afternoons I
didn’t go to study bible were spent in the Workmen’s Circle Y.L. Peretz Folk
Shule, where history began with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the
beginning of unions in the U.S.Where
does Jewish history really begin? Wherever it began, it was connected in my
mind with Yiddish.Eventually when I
came to study at the university, it was not surprising I hooked up with Hayden
White, who when he was introduced to me as one of the foremost historians of
the day I responded “So, who are the other three?”We soon began trading books on Roland
Barthes.

So much was
brought to life through Yiddish.Because
there were so few pupils in the school – all children of refugees who wished to
preserve a tradition in the face of a seductive new world - we were encouraged
to express ourselves, to use the language in any way possible.Every
year there was the Purim Shpiel where I played Haman, my head wrapped in a
large Turkish towel and sporting a wonderful villainous moustache.A national composition contest about the
American Jewish socialist and Zionist, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, brought me to
read my winning essay on the Yiddish Shtunde, the local Yiddish radio program,
when I was ten.Soon after an ironic
essay about my epicurean cat was published in the pages of the Yiddish
newspaper, the Forwards, in response to my mother’s worry that my concern for
felines would lead me to a “katz in kopp,” an obsession with cats.Had my family not needed to move and escape
the declining neighborhood, I’m sure my love for the language would have
continued to direct my talents. But the entire scene disappeared at the same
time.

My mother and
father continued to fight for the presence of Yiddish, even after we moved to a
more assimilated, bourgeois neighborhood where the old ways were an
embarrassment at best.Among their many
activities my parents organized a Yiddish Cultural Council and made sure to
bring as many theater troupes, writers and poets travelling through the area to
appear before a loyal audience at the Jewish center.Some of the characters stand out even today
in my memory.

But the most
entertaining was the one to become the best known.When I was fifteen I was introduced to Satan
in Goray. It had just come out in English and was almost exciting as Jack
Kerouac or Henry Miller to me.A year or
two after it was announced that Isaac Bashevis Singer would be the next Yiddish
lecturer and even though I was beginning to look down at the newcomers,the “Greener,” I found a corner to sit at his
lecture where I could dissociate myself from the crowd.

As Singer began
to speak – an old spiel that I’ve heard since about all the ways in which
(because of its outsider status) one could use Yiddish to be ‘naughty,’ it was
clear that it was not pleasing to the audience.There were little “no’s” and “oy’s” and even a few gasps. I seem to
remember that Florence Newman announced she was about to faint.After the weak polite applause my mother took
Singer by the hand, brought him to my little corner, and said “Here is a person
who appreciates your approach!”I was
left to entertain the speaker while my parents apologized to all their friends
who had expected culture and received ‘filth’.

For both of us
this was a pleasure.His joy at being
left alone with a young woman was unbounded and the other results of the
evening disappeared for him.At the
obligatory dinner which followed I cannot remember the conversation, but am
sure it included only two happy diners.

Later he seemed
not to remember our meeting, even though we met later on numerous
occasions.

Singer’s
relationships to women seemed to be based more on their ability to translate to
English – not his words but his ideas.Often his translators didn’t even know the language but relied on his
reading what he claimed to be a spontaneous but literal translation in order to
craft a tale.I am certain that Yiddish
was to him a kind of secret language that allowed his thoughts to range
uncensored even as he rewrote his memories and fantasies.The rarity and depth of the language opened for
him the door to another world.

And so it was
with me.Although I had crafted many
poems in my mind, and had even written some poems in Yiddish, the need to write
in English confined me.It was only when
the press of the Yiddish Writers turned to me to ask for a little volume of
poems that I felt both the justification and the freedom to really explore the
Yiddish in me.

My poems began
with a discussion of the difficulty of writing – I lacked the vocabulary – and
I wrote first of my unworthiness to be a Yiddish poet.And then I admitted the dangers of being
influenced by imagining the denunciation by Yiddish purists, how I would have
to simply ignore the potential criticism and even worse, the absence of
response.

It was in that
moment that poems began coming to me from long-ago voices, and the imperative
to use the language of the stories I had heard about relatives who disappeared became
a driving force despite my linguistic unfitness.I only dared write about some of the memories
– my partisan aunt, the rogue old lady who grudgingly took us in when we came
to America, the refugees my parents sheltered for many years.The others, no less colorful, remain in
drafts – the gypsies’ abduction of my mother, the beatings my father received
on the streets of Danzig, my brother’s failed attempt to assert democracy in
our new home in the new world. I thought
I would await a response before I continued in my efforts.A review, a few gruff responses, a comical
observation.Nothing came.

Fortunately, after
I’d completed a draft the Yiddish publishers requested a dual-language book,
and although I generally use Hebrew only for prose, I found it comfortable to
translate the poems into Hebrew.The
Hebrew translations, facing the Yiddish poems, succeeded in winning numerous
reviews, all praising – first the nerve and then the nostalgia. (nothing about
the poetry) The Hebrew versions were reprinted in many journals and
newspapers.Nothing about the Yiddish.

There were at
least two people who helped me with the Yiddish – the poet Rivka Bassman
Ben-Haim and the writer Daniel Galay.They encouraged me all the way, but I had to think for a while if it was
really worth it to publish in Yiddish.After all, it meant neglecting my English poetry for well over a
year.It wasn’t just a change of
language, but of exploring a different corner of my heart, of reaching into
forgotten places not only of my own history, but the history of a culture. Often they mesh – there are so many examples
of mamme loshen I have heard no where else:When my baby could not be calmed in the first
three months of her life, and the doctors had told me to let her cry, my mother
did a ritualistic cleansing of my apartment from the evil eye.

A CHARM AGAINST
THE EYE

(from the
Yiddish)

Who has given
you the evil eye

May rough bark
cover his hide.

Who has given
you the evil eye

May rough bark
cover his hide.

In the forests
there are four clefts

May the curse
disappear in their depths.

In the forests
there are four clefts

May the curse
disappear in their depths.

It was tongue-in-cheek,
of course, but her order for the evil eye to be hidden away in four piles of
waste of the forest seemed to work.My
daughter slept that night for the first time.I remember every word of that charm.If I don’t write it down, and explain the process of the ritual, who
will know?I have to admit, however,
that I changed one word for the rhyme – shpalten are not ‘clefts’ but ‘piles
of shit.’

I did not
always respect the culture of the orphan generation, the generation who could
not pass on their wit and knowledge to their children.In college, exposed to so many other
cultures, I was particularly impervious to the wisdom of the elders,one example: my folk dance troupe specialized in couple
dancing, and my dance partner and I were scheduled for a performance. Not only
was my dancing lacking in grace and charm, but I had a tendency to turn left
when everyone else was turning right. And my partner was increasingly drawn to
a beautiful dancer with a long blond braid.The dance we were to perform was called the Alexandrovska, popular in
the court of the Czar, and involved a turn in which my partner was supposed to
lift me up and lower me on his other side. The blond was much lighter and more
graceful than me. So I practiced every
chance I could get, humming the music and swaying as I passed my parents,
ignoring their presence. “Oh, I know that song!”My mother exclaimed, and then began to sing,

In Vilna, the maidens,

they go to dance classes.

And the boys

Laugh at the lasses

They whirl the ‘valchick’ (little
waltz)

this way and there –

each little maiden

with her cavalier.

When my partner
exchanged me for the blond, that song made me shrug it off.Taking oneself too seriously is difficult in
Yiddish.

Despite all the
efforts to revive the language, sometimes now, when I meet my friends, they
will remember an incident from their grandmother, or a saying of their
grandfather, or just a phrase I have never heard of.It’s
not in the dictionary or a phrasebook, but surely it deserves that we make an
effort in any way we can to write them down.